


Piece One: Stephen Strange

by MashpotatoeQueen5



Series: Puzzle Pieces [2]
Category: Doctor Strange (2016), Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: ? - Freeform, Aftermath of Torture, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Angst and Feels, Blood, Blood and Gore, Blood and Injury, Blood and Torture, Blood and Violence, But better safe than sorrry, Character Study, Death, Gore, I think it's a positive note, Not to specific or descriptive, PTSD, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, So much death, Sort Of, Stephen Strange feels guilty, Temporary Character Death, The whole world's a mess, They're dealing, Though it's all really just mentions, Timey-Wimey, Tissue Warning, Torture, Violence, everyone's a mess, mentions of torture, probably not but just in case
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-22
Updated: 2018-05-22
Packaged: 2019-05-10 06:20:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14731578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MashpotatoeQueen5/pseuds/MashpotatoeQueen5
Summary: These heroes, these martyrs. These are Stephen’s ghosts, his failures. These are the people who were burned in the fire, who drowned in the floods. These were the people who banded together in future after future, who loved so fiercely and lost so much, who even now look at him with eyes reflecting hidden fears and shoulders stooped under the weight of haunted pasts and too many mistakes.These are Stephen’s ghosts, and they are living and breathing and real, and still he looks at them and feels like this is just another future where they don’t make it, where Strange fails them, where he fails them all.These are his miracle hands. These are his shaking fingers. These are his living ghosts.Stephen watches them, just as he always had.He hopes, this time, it doesn’t end in failure.





	Piece One: Stephen Strange

**Author's Note:**

> WARNING
> 
> ANGST AHEAD. ANGST AND TORTURE MENTIONS AND CHARACTER DEATHS AND VIOLENCE AND PANIC ATTACKS AND GUILT AND PTSD. PLEASE DO NOT READ IF IT MIGHT TRIGGER.
> 
> Hope you all enjoy!
> 
> Also, kudos to Gathering_Stars, who really kick started my inspiration for this fic! Everyone who likes it can thank them for it. :)

Dr. Strange knows that it was the only way.

He knows that it was.

Really.

He sits on nothing, breathes in red dust. The green stone on his chest flares bright, and time opens up for him, bright and colourful and an infinite number of opportunities. Stephen watches flow by, watches the streams of possibilities.

So many chances. So many opportunities.

So few solutions.

Many of them depend on chance, on a coin landing on heads, on a coin landing on tails. These are the options that depend on the roll of a dice, small tiny factors that are up to nature and fate deciding the reality that will occur.

These are the options that he discards, rushing through them one by one by one. He will not let his world be determined by chance, not when the risks are so high. Not when so much depends on them getting this right.

It leaves him with this: fourteen hundred thousand, six hundred and five options, and very little time to explore them. He sets himself to work.

 

_Option 1:_

_They run. They hide in deep catacombs and disappear in wreckages of ships and civilizations long since lost. A blue robotic lady comes, and she is cold and calculative and bearing a vehicle that looks like it could maybe fall apart at any moment._

_They get on, creep out of hiding places and hidey holes. Travel back to Earth. They regroup with the others, they spread out, the shore defenses._

_Thanos finds them. He finds them when they hide at bases, when they hide in abandoned civilian houses, when they hide off world. He finds them._

_He kills them._

_Strange dies. He dies again and again and again. He dies of strangulation. He dies of a spear to the heart. He dies from being blasted apart from the inside. He dies from a thousand cuts, all open and left to bleed him dry._

_Thanos gets the stones._

_There is death, there is death, there is death._

_There is no return._

_Failure._

 

He picks through futures like one might pick through bookstores, trying to find that perfect story that is hidden away from sight. He reads the words, scans the paragraphs. There are so many of them, and he looks and he searches and he _looks._

It feels like it is not enough. It feels like failure.

But Strange is nothing but persistent. He pushes through.

 

_They go back to Earth. They seek out the Scarlet Witch._

_She tries to destroy the stones._

_Tries._

_Something always goes wrong._

_She dies, someone stabbing her or shooting her or evaporating her. Strange gets captured. The Vision gets captured. There is torture. There is pain._

_A fight goes wrong. A distraction fails to deploy. A person refuses to fight. The building crumbles, the morals fall._

_There is death, there is death, there is death._

_There is no return._

_Failure._

 

_They find the hero Antman, and the tech shrinks him down small enough to sneak into Thanos’ ear. Surely the Titan won’t notice- Surely-_

_He notices. There is a crunch. There is a splat. A body grows, it grows, mangled blood and muscle and bone, and the spider kid turns away and throws up on cold hard asphalt._

_The kid will soon be in a similar position._

_They will all soon be in a similar position, shrunk small and crushed flat, left to grow for the world to see, mangled bodies of defeated heroes, the smell thick and the gore sickening._

_The Peter kid isn’t the only one to throw up that day._

_The Peter kid isn’t the only one to die that day._

_There is death, there is death, there is death._

_There is no return._

_Failure._

 

Patterns form, for even fate is not a random thing. For people are behaviors and behaviors are patterns. They never win when they go back to earth.

Something always goes wrong when they go back to Earth.

( _Death and pain and misery and agony. People scream, people die, he screams, he dies. There is so much, so much. His hands shake, they shake they shake. He can’t get them to stop, can’t get any of this to stop-)_

They have to stay in Titan.

He breathes. He starts again.

 

_Strange hides the Time Stone and the ragtag group surrounds Thanos. They attack, around and around and around, in whirling oiled machine of motion and pain. Strange uses his portals to swing Peter around and Mantis knocks the Titan out with her powers. Peter and Stark begin to pull the glove off- Star Lord starts questioning about Gamora._

_Strange gags him and binds his arms. They get the arm off._

_A moment’s breath. Celebration?_

_No. Thanos breaks free, angry, strong, too powerful. He reaches out, grabs Stark before Strange can even_ think. _The glove is slotted back into place, reality warps, they melt, melt melt- melt into puddles of goo, melt into nothing._

_Strange is left alone._

_Torture is painful._

_Fast, liquid torture. Pain that bleeds into itself like blood into a stream, like his own blood drip, drip, dripping into the soft red earth-_

_Death is painful._

_Life drains out of him, slowly, and he does not tell of the stone’s whereabouts. Does not betray his sacred duties._

_It means nothing, in the end. Just that they have a little bit more time, just that Thanos takes a little longer in killing them- one by one by one- and has to spend resources in finding the Time Stone._

_After that, he goes back to Earth. He finds the Mind Stone._

_There is death, there is death, there is death._

_There is no return._

_Failure._

  


_They fight. They bleed. They bruise._

_Strange opens up a portal. Opens it up right in the middle of Thanos’ big purple neck, slices him open and watches a battle end without so much a whimper._

_The Titan dies. They cheer._

_They do not cheer long._

_Every time, every time, every time Thanos dies in their fight, something happens. Someone finds them. A follower attacks their ship, and their battle weakened frames get overwhelmed. A space pirate thinks_ shiny _and rams into them. There is an engine failure. There is an explosion. There are toxic chemicals in the air or an unexpected asteroid belt._

_Strange dies. He dies in the great vasts of space. He dies by being torn apart. He dies by flames. He dies by poison and toxic gas._

_He watches everyone around him, too._

_Someone gets the glove, and they are not the good guys. They commence with Thanos’ plan or follow their own, worse paths._

_There is death, there is death, there is death._

_There is no return._

_Failure._

 

_Strange tells Star Lord about Gamora. Takes him aside and tells him. He has to watch a grown man break down. Has to watch a grown man cry._

_Strange tells him, lets him know._

_Strange hides the Time Stone and the ragtag group surrounds Thanos. They attack, around and around and around, in whirling oiled machine of motion and pain. Strange uses his portals to swing Peter around and Mantis knocks the Titan out with her powers. Peter and Stark begin to pull the glove off- Star Lord doesn’t start questioning about Gamora: he already knows._

_Does this sound familiar? It should. It’s a slight alteration, not by much. The ending is still the same._

_Star Lord brushes past Mantis, and there is grief, grief, grief. She gives out, she collapses._

_Thanos wakes up._

_Angry, strong, too powerful. He reaches out._

_Stark gets torn in two. The sound of Spider Man's heartbroken cry will haunt Stephen’s dreams for the rest of his life._

_Drax’s back is broken, and he will never walk again. The sickening crunch echoes in the wizard’s ears. He watches Star Lord scream. He watches Star Lord die._

_There is so much death, in these futures. So much death, so much resolution._

_There is battle. There is blood. There is dust._

_Torture is painful, but it’s a fast torture this time. Thanos takes his hands, his trembling, shaking hands. His miracle workers. His livelihood._

_Thanos takes his hands. He chops them off._

_Strange_ screams.

_There is death, there is death, there is death._

_There is no return._

_Failure._

 

More trials. More patterns. Thanos cannot be killed here. Not now, not this conflict.

Tony can’t be killed. For some reason, Stark plays a key role in the future events, and every time he dies they fail. They fail, they fail, they fail.

Tony can’t be killed.

( _He’s something special, and even fate agrees.)_

Star Lord cannot find out about Gamora beforehand, cannot be stopped from his rage and grief. Holding him back means meeting their doom.

_This is love,_ Stephen thinks, _And it is powerful._

His thoughts flit briefly, every so briefly, to Christine. They do not stay long. Cannot stay long. There are futures to explore. Deaths to experience. Tortures to face.

Solutions to find, needles in haystacks to seek.

Strange wishes for a match. Wishes to set the hay on fire and watch it _burn._

But there is no match, there is only him, and he shifts and he shifts and he searches.

His hands grasp needles, but his grip can’t hold.

Shaking hands and delicate procedures. Never the best combination.

 

_In this future, he watches Stark dive to the side a little quick. Watches a blast meant for the older man hit young flesh and bones, watches Peter’s wide eyes squeeze tight in pain, watches the kid fade away to nothing and Stark growl and attack until there is nothing left, until all he is is metal shards and dusty tears._

 

_In this future, they are captured, and Strange watches a young tree creature get plucked apart, piece by piece by piece by piece. Watches a raccoon scream and snarl and threaten, watches those angry loud words drop and wither and transform into pleads and begs and whimpers._

 

_In this future, Stephen watches a young man with an old soul get tortured. He knows where the mind stone is, will not reveal its location. His face is tired, his eyes are worn, his long dark hair hangs in his face and every torture thrown at him gets no response, not a single whimper, not a single scream._

_They catch gazes, just once. Strange knows that this is a gaze of a man who has faced too many tortures to count. Knows this is the gaze of a man who has long since died somewhere deep inside, and is just waiting for the rest of his body to catch up._

_A blonde man besides Stephen is the one who screams, so bound that not a single toe can twitch. In another life, the wizard might have called him a captain. In this life, all he knows him as is desperate. Desperate and heartbroken, desperate and afraid._

_The blonde escapes, somehow. He yanks himself free, but he does not run away. He runs to the fallen, tortured brown haired man and kneels by his side, places their foreheads together close and quiet and in a bond beyond strength of imagination._

_“I’m with you, I’m with you, I’m with you till the end of the line, till the end of the line-”_

_The brunette closes his eyes- his body catches up- and he doesn’t open them._

_The blonde says nothing, presses close and tight, tears making tracks on a dirt stained face. He trembles, he shakes, he sobs._

_Repeats, like a broken record, “I’m with you, I’m with you, I’m with you till the end of the line, till the end of the line-”_

_(Sometimes, those words play like a soundtrack in Strange’s dreams. He hears them many times, in these many futures, for the blonde man seems destined to watch this scenario again and again. The words never fail to haunt him, and he knows they are important. He knows.)_

 

_In this future, a young woman with platinum blonde hair and a man with wings of steel escape. They escape, they are quickly captured._

_The Falcon’s wings are torn apart and used as darts. The target was their previous master, and by the end of the affair they are bloody and ruined._

_So is the body, but Strange can’t seem to bring himself to look for more than a second._

_The woman stands trial next, and there is something different._

_The woman stares Thanos in the eyes, and there is something there that Strange cannot place. He knows that this lady is a spy, knows she is a part of the Avengers, but he never knew she could be this terrifying. Never knew that her eyes could see into souls in this way._

_She says something- Strange can’t hear it. Everything is muffled and he is drowning, drowning, no air in his lungs and eyes slowly shifting shut- and Thanos roars, loud, angry, uncontrolled and what might have passed as heartbroken if the being was not a monster, not merciless, not who he has become. It is loud, loud enough to reach even Stephen’s clogged ears._

_But there are no happy endings. The woman is killed, and his eyes drift shut..._

 

_In this future, they are lined up in a neat row and shot one by one by one. The Scarlet Witch watches. She watches, and her face is washed in tears and her eyes are alive with rage, and she looks to Thanos and Thanos looks back, takes a child’s head into hand and blows it up._

_The woman tips her head back, she screams._

_Everything goes red. Everything goes black._

_There is sheer power, just for a moment._

_And then there is nothing. Nothing at all._

 

_In this future, in this future, in this future…_

_Thousands of futures. Thousands of choices. Thousands of mistakes._

_There is death, there is death, there is death._

_There is no return._

_Failure._

 

_Failure, Failure, Failure._ The word, it drowns him. It swallows him whole. It is everywhere and everything, and his hands shake and his mind searches, searches, searches. He has experienced a thousand pains and a thousand tortures, tasted dust in his mouth and felt blood in his eyes. He has heard the screams of dying souls, heard the sobs of the ones left behind.

 

(He does not know which is worse.)

 

Everything shakes. Everything falls apart.

Strange knows it’s not his fault.

Really.

 

Really.

 

He stumbles upon it on the brink.

A solution.

A broken solution. A painful solution.

But it’s what they have, and it goes like this:

 

_Strange hides the Time Stone and the ragtag group surrounds Thanos. They attack, around and around and around, in whirling oiled machine of motion and pain. Strange uses his portals to swing Peter around and Mantis knocks the Titan out with her powers. Peter and Stark begin to pull the glove off- Star Lord starts questioning about Gamora._

(Thanos cannot die and Star Lord cannot know about Gamora before the battle. These are the patterns, and Strange knows them well.)

_Star Lord rages. Thanos wakes up._

_They battle. They bleed. The moon gets pulled closer and Strange’s magic is not enough, reality bending and slipping all wrong and all too fast._

_They fight, they fight, they fight._

_There is a threat of death. It is on Tony’s head._

(Tony cannot die. Tony cannot know.)

_Strange reaches out and plucks the stone out of the sky. It is here, and Thanos takes it, and he disappears._

_They are bloody. They are bleeding._

_They will soon be disappearing._

_Everyone will soon be disappearing._

_There is death, there is death, there is death._

_There is_ pain. _There is_ devastation. _There is so much of it, he drowns in it, drowns in parents crying over children’s empty beds, drowns in children reaching out for adults who are no longer there, drowns in the anguish of half the universe suddenly lost to the people who love them._

_But…_

_But there is a return._

_There is a chance._

_Solution._

 

Tony asks him how many times they succeed. And it is one. It is one, and it goes like this, just like this. If they can get this right- _if they can get this right._

 

They do it.

 

Strange feels Stark’s surprised eyes when he hands over the Time Stone. Strange feels Stark’s desperate gaze as he feels his own body disappear into nothingness, collapse into dust.

It is not a bad sensation. It is not painful, not like the tortures he could have experienced.

Not like the pains those who remain will experience, before all this is done.

He says, “There was no other way,” and he means it. There is no other way to survive this, to win this. There was no other way but to give up the stone, to let those who fade fade to dust.

There was no other way but these tortures and pains. There was no other way but the tortures and pains to come.

He is apologizing. He is explaining.

He is dying, vanishing, vanishing into dust.

He is dead. He is nothing.

There is nothing, not anymore.

Strange closes his eyes.

He is tired.

The dark is welcome.

 

In the days after, where Thanos is vanquished and the world is falling apart at the seams and trying to pull itself back together, Strange watches.

He knows that it was the only way.

He knows.

But sometimes, he walks the streets and he sees the shattered people that his plan has left in his wake. Sometimes, he sees the anguish and the pain and the terror filled eyes of those who remember it, remember dying and disintegrating and fading, fading, fading into nothing. It was quick, it was painless, but they were _gone._ They were still _gone,_ and they still had to come back.

A mother holds her child too tights as they go to the store. A teenager kisses her girlfriend’s cheek and closes her eyes in quiet frustration, the frustration that is grief and fear and hollow pain that will not go away, not now, not next week, not for a very long time. An elderly couple dances, and the old man keeps having to stop so he can cry.

People are still missing. They faded to dust and came back in the wrong spot. They got lost in the hectic organization systems built up to deal with the sudden surplus of orphans and widows and widowers.They were taken from the streets before they could ever get home.

Strange looks for them, looks for them in whatever ways he can, a voice crying in his mind _your fault your fault your fault-_

The voice, it drowns him. It drowns everything out.

Strange knows what it’s like to drown.

  


Sometimes, he remembers vanishing into dust himself. It was quick, it was painless, he shouldn’t complain.

But death is quiet and life is loud, and the sound rings shrill in his ears, a constant reminder of _alive alive alive,_ and it is tiring.

It stops him from resting, stops him from living, and if that is not ironic, he doesn’t know what is.

These days, he feels too aware of his own breaths, and he counts them, and the numbers fumble, and he can’t quite keep up.

  


Sometimes, he remembers worse pains. A thousand tortures. A thousand screams. A thousand deaths.

He says thousands, he means millions.

Numbers fumble.

He falls apart.

His hands shake and shake and shake, they shake until he can’t pick anything up, can’t even _think_ straight, and everything is just the tremors in his hand, in his body, in his soul.

These hands, he knows, are miracle workers. But they weren’t _enough._

  


Wong finds him tucked away deep in the library. The smell of old books is strong. It smells like paper, it smells like dust.

Strange can’t quite seem to breathe, and in his eyes he watches as billions of people vanish into nothing, again and again and again, and he shakes.

He shakes, breathe heaving. He remembers pain. He remembers tortured eyes and tortured hearts and souls. He remembers cruel grins and agonizing terror.

He remembers death.

At this point, he knows it more than he’s ever known life.

_Some hero,_ he thinks, _some hero, to be so weak. Some master, some wizard, some_ **_hero-_ **

_I never claimed to be one,_ some distant part of him yells, _I never wanted this, any of this-_

The voices play in his head. Strange can’t hear them: he’s too busy falling apart.

Wong places his hand on Stephan’s shoulder, and the doctor closes his eyes and focuses on that, just on that, and clenches his fists hard and tight.

But they do not stop their tremors, and for all his studies, Strange can escape his body, but not his mind.

  


He meets them. These heroes, these martyrs. Those few beings that fate decided it liked, stuck them into patterns and into lives in which there will always be another fight, another war.

These people, these people who love people, who will give themselves up, every time, because they believe in humanity and the fact that it has something to offer.

Strange knows this. He’s seen it.

 

He shakes the hand of the brown haired man with his too old soul. _Call me Bucky,_ the man says, and Strange nods.

He does not tell the soldier that they have met before, in another life. That they have met a million times before. That Bucky had said the same thing to hm before and had then gone down, choking on blood, and had not gotten back up again.

He does not tell the soldier that he looks into his warm brown eyes- _alive eyes, alive-_ and can only see the dead orbs of a man with a thousand tortures, can only hear the screams and cries and muttered mantra, “ _Till the end of the line, till the end of the line-”_

Rocket Raccoon makes a sarcastic comment. Strange snarks back, and pushes away the image of that same face twisted in rage and in grief, that same face begging and pleading and _desperate._

He cannot look Peter in the eyes. Cannot spend more than an hour in Tony’s presence. Not for a long time, because he looks at them and he them dying and reaching for eachother, sees them screaming and crying and raging and pained, and his heart becomes lead.

He looks at Falcon, he sees blood, he looks at the Black Widow, and he remembers those deadly, too deep eyes. He is introduced to the Scarlet Witch, and she looks calm and small and soft in her loose sweater and deep raccoon eyes, but Strange has felt her pain, Strange has felt her rage,and she knows not everyone is as they seem.

Strange has felt her power, and he will never forget it.

 

These heroes, these martyrs. These are Stephen’s ghosts, his failures. These are the people who were burned in the fire, who drowned in the floods. These were the people who banded together in future after future, who loved so fiercely and lost so much, who even now look at him with eyes reflecting hidden fears and shoulders stooped under the weight of haunted pasts and too many mistakes.

These are Stephen’s ghosts, and they are living and breathing and real, and still he looks at them and feels like this is just another future where they don’t make it, where Strange fails them, where he fails them all.

These are his miracle hands. These are his shaking fingers. These are his living ghosts.

Stephen watches them, just as he always had.

He hopes, this time, it doesn’t end in tears.

 

One day, Stephen walks down a street and watches a child break away from her mother’s grip and runs towards him. The boy’s hands are grubby, covered in ice cream drippings and dirt and saliva, but his grin is wide and his eyes are bright. In his clenched fist, there are a few dandelion flowers with bent stems and missing petals.

He takes those flowers, gentle, so gentle, holds them tight in shaking fingers. The boy laughs, light, alive, and Strange watches.

A teenager kisses her girlfriend’s cheek and closes her eyes in quiet frustration. Her girlfriend bops her nose and smiles, almond eyes crinkling under magenta glasses, and the grief and the fear and the hollow pain does not go away, but it settles, and the teenager finds that small reserve of happiness that exists in every person and smiles back.

An elderly couple dances, and the old man keeps having to stop and cry. His wife holds his hands, and the tears pass, and she takes his arm and they spin to a song no one else can hear, old bones and weathered faces and wrinkled hands and all.

 

Through it all, Stephen watches.

 

He finds the missing. He finds them, he brings them home. Watches tears leak out of the eyes of person after person, and they are happy tears, relieved tears. He watches hugs. He watches reunions.

The people thank him, and he does not say that he does not deserve their praise, their grace, not when it is his fault in the first place, but he’s close to it, every time.

They thank him, and Strange nods his head.

It will have to be enough.

 

These are the people that exist. These people with their broken healing hearts and resilient smiles. These living ghosts. These splashes of dust, all gathered up, crafted into something new and different but not wholly unbeautiful.

They breathe and they live and they survive.

Strange watches them, because this was the path he had set. Their troubles, their worries, their laughter and sadness and smiles and woes. That is all on him, all on him, because this is the results of his plan, this is the results of the path that he had laid out for them all, a one in a million opportunity to win.

And they won.

So yes, Dr. Strange knows that it was the only way.

But sometimes he sits on his bed and not even the most intricate wards can keep out the thoughts in his head, can keep out the guilt crashing down on him. Sometimes, he watches tired eyes and broken souls and can’t quite make himself stay close. Sometimes, he sees ghosts of people who do not exist, lost to chance, lost to fate, lost to the small patterns of behaviors that made everyone up.

And sometimes it’s all he can do to just keep existing at all.

These are his miracle hands. These are his shaking fingers. These are his living ghosts.

This is his world. These are his people. He will give himself up for them, every time, because he believes in humanity and the fact that it has something to offer.

He knows this. He’s done it.

Fearful gazes. Broken hearts. Angry words and painful tortures, Stephen has seen it all.

This is why he shakes, why he doubts, why he laments.

Small smiles. Relieved tears. Tattered flowers gripped in trembling fingers.

This is why he stays.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Any suggestions for who I should do next?


End file.
